Truth And Reconciliation In J. M. Coetzee`s Disgrace

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or the TRC, was a political strategy which attempted to acknowledge past sufferings of the apartheid, whilst promoting a future based on the concerns of forgiveness, social justice, and a movement toward equality. It offered complete amnesty for perpetrators if they told the truth about their crimes against humanity, but maintained that the perpetrators faced criminal prosecution if they refused to speak up. It also offered victims the chance to speak about how they had suffered under the apartheid regime. The chairman of the TRC was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whose 1999 book No Future without Forgiveness echoes the founding principles of the commission. How indeed could there be hope of forgiveness, or reconciliation, without victims hearing the truth and apologies from those who oppressed their families for decades. There are many different views over whether or not the TRC proved successful, but I am going to touch upon how it is addressed in J.M. Coetzee's 1999 novel Disgrace. The novel follows David Lurie, 'professor of communications' [D, 3] at a University in Cape Town. White, fifty-two years old and twice divorced, he has a rash affair with one of his students, Melanie, renamed by Lurie as 'the dark one' [D, 18], in which, at least once, the pressure of his sex upon her is arguably an act of rape. The news gets out and he is summoned under an article which deals with 'victimization or harassment on grounds of race, ethnic group, religion, gender, sexual preference, or physical disability' [D, 39]. He is called to a hearing, chaired by the Professor of Religious Studies [D, 47], where a committee attempts to drag from him not a legal plea of guilt, but rather a public confession or statement of his wrongdoing. One member, Desmond Swarts, is particularly pressing on this point [D, 51-54]. Lurie's answers do not please the committee and he is asked to resign from his profession. Lurie leaves Cape Town and stays with his daughter, Lucy, in the countryside, where he agrees to help out on the land and in an animal welfare clinic. Before too long, Lurie and Lucy are attacked by a gang of black men. Lurie is set alight and locked in the bathroom while his daughter is raped and her dogs shot. Lucy refuses to tell the police of the sexual assault, despite her father's protests. She is left pregnant. As Lucy's black neighbours gain more power, her father feels stripped of his social standing. He becomes tied to the animal welfare clinic, helping to put down stray dogs and dispose of their corpses. He becomes the dog-man. The novel closes as Lurie puts down a dog which he has grown, perhaps, to love. Immediately, one can find many allusions to the TRC, not least in Lurie's hearing where the chairman as Professor of Religious Studies can be seen as a parallel to Archbishop Desmond Tutu. One member of the committee, Desmond Swartz, shares the Archbishop's Christian name and, spoken aloud, his surname means 'black', reminding readers of a black/white dichotomy of which Lurie finds himself a part. The article under which Lurie is summoned deals with victimising others of a different sex or race, and although Lurie's deed falls more heavily under a victimisation due to sex, the fact that Melanie is darker skinned does not go unnoticed by the committee, who remind Lurie of the case's 'overtones' in such a time [50], and 'the long history of exploitation' which precedes him [53]. Excepting these specific details, a larger issue ties Lurie's case to the TRC, concerning the question of how he should be judged. The TRC was formed as a compromise to many parties' more extreme post-apartheid wishes. The rising African National Congress would probably have preferred a harsher punishment whilst the ruling National Party would have preferred total amnesty for fear of retribution after their 46 year reign of racist oppression. Archbishop Tutu's approach seemed to combine the two, offering amnesty for those who wished to humble themselves for forgiveness, their public confessions a contentious fusion of the sacred and the secular. In a situation where every slave-owner was in the wrong, pleading guilty or not guilty was not the problem: the question was of remorse. Ultimately, the aim was to move forward in a spirit of forgiveness, both from the victims of apartheid and from God. Hypothetically, forgiveness could unite the secular and the sacred. After all, forgiveness is a fundamental concern of Abrahamic religions, which in turn have dictated laws throughout history: The Law of God echoing the founding principles of many laws still in place (Thou Shalt Not Murder, for example). Furthermore, as Hannah Arendt argues, punishment and forgiveness are not so distinct from one another: 'men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and... they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable'. If this can be seen to be the case, Tutu's commission seems to reconcile not only slave and slave-owner, but also the sacred and secular. However, in Disgrace, Coetzee shows how these concerns cannot easily unite; rather than the secular and sacred working together, Lurie's hearing seems to pull in two opposing directions. The committee at once advises Lurie to seek the help of a lawyer and a priest [49]. They do not accept his plea of guilt, but rather want an admission of wrongdoing which Lurie refuses to give because it would be 'beyond the scope of the law' [55]. At the same time, they only accept his challenge to the makeup of the committee in a legal sense, and wish not to concern themselves with what Lurie calls his 'philosophical reservations' [47]. Most strikingly, they want him to make a statement of contrition (where 'contrition' has decidedly Catholic connotations) by which they hope, from the words he uses, to 'divine whether it comes from [his] heart' [54]. The use of 'divine' is, of course, ironic. It is impossible for a human to 'divine' such a thing. This is in accordance with Anthony Holiday's critique of the TRC, as he too argues that its Christian and judicial elements were contradictory. The essence of confession lies in the confession booth, or in the prayer. As such, supposing that one can identify the spirit of repentance is almost hubristic. As Lurie reasons, [turn to p. 58 and read]:

I appeared before an officially constituted tribunal, before a branch of the law. Before that secular tribunal I pleaded guilty, a secular plea. That plea should suffice. Repentance is neither here nor there. Repentance belongs to another world, to another universe of discourse [58].

There can be little doubt that Lurie has done something wrong by sleeping with his student, but although he acknowledges his guilt in a legal sense, he cannot confess a personal sense of guilt. Indeed, if it is personal, it cannot be publically confessed. If a public confession is called for, there can be no guarantee that the statement is from the heart. However, the complications do not end here. Unlike statements given at hearings organised by the TRC, whether they are sincere or not, Disgrace is a work of literature and, as such, fiction is at its core. Whereas TRC narratives were judged by the possibility of inherent truthfulness and - in the text - Lurie's committee hope to measure his contrition by the words he uses, Coetzee pushes further. He uses his authorial power to uncover Lurie's private thoughts as well as the ones he expresses publically. The best example of this is when Lurie visits Melanie's parents towards the end of the novel. He supplicates himself before them in an act of humbled contrition as a response to the pressures he had put on their family since having the affair with their daughter, but although this is precisely the sort of act the committee were pushing to witness, Coetzee understands that such actions do not necessarily display the inner workings of the supplicant. Indeed, in apologising for his behaviour, Lurie feels a leap of desire as he regards Melanie's even younger sister: the aptly named Desiree [173]. Being so close to the end of the novel, one may wonder whether Lurie's character has progressed. Where literature so often aspires to the Bildungsroman, or personal journey to find out about oneself and become a better person, Disgrace is not so transparent. A question often asked is whether Lurie is still in disgrace by the end of the novel, or whether he has paid for his sins through the suffering he and his daughter have undergone; whether, through his fall from professor to dog-man (a title earned from his work on the farm and the clinic) he has achieved a spiritual elevation, even grace. The scene at Melanie's family home would suggest not, but there cannot be any right or wrong answer: at least not one which readers can judge. Indeed, even a work of fiction which allows readers to witness both the actions and thoughts of a character cannot arrive at a clear answer. In the very fact that Disgrace is a novel, and moreover a novel about South Africa, it becomes a public act, albeit an act of literature. As such, by the privacy that defines contrition, it cannot be considered a confession. In order to elucidate this further, I shall turn to Coetzee's other work; indeed his interest in the confession is not limited to Disgrace. It can be found across his oeuvre, most evidently in his study on confession in Rousseau, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. David Attwell analyses this essay and writes that:

The principle elaborated [in the study] is that truth in confession cannot be arrived at by introspection alone, no matter how rigorous, that the endless story of the self will be brought to finality only at the point where it is most unaware; release comes with an affirmation or imposition of truth - alternatively, from grace. This is not an easy lesson for a secular, critical postmodernism to absorb, but it is one that enables Coetzee to address more directly the crucial problem of narrative authority.

With this in mind, one cannot arrive at an answer as to whether or not Lurie has achieved grace because, to reiterate, 'the endless story of the self will be brought to finality only at the point where it is most unaware'. 'The endless story of the self' may be considered the memories we construct and others construct around ourselves. A release from this story - in Lurie's case the story of himself as a disgraced professor - comes at the point at which he is least aware of his own story; the point at which he is utterly selfless. If one is religious, this may be an easier concept to understand but, as Attwell points out, 'release comes with an affirmation or imposition of truth - alternatively, from grace. This is not an easy lesson for a secular, critical postmodernism to absorb'. With postmodernism comes an endless sense of self-doubt as the textuality of a novel is brought to the fore. With a continual questioning of the self comes very little opportunity for selflessness. Speaking from a position of secular postmodernism, Coetzee writes:

`The standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not "that which is not" and the proof that it is the pain that it feels ... Not grace, then, but at least the body.... It is not that one grants authority to the suffering body: the suffering body takes this authority: that is its power`

'Not grace then, but at least the body'. What significance could this hold for post-apartheid South Africa? Coetzee insists: 'Let me put it baldly: in South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body.' As Derek Attridge observes, Coetzee's words are 'chosen with extraordinary care', so it is no coincidence that his profession is embedded within `authority`. The suffering body takes authority and, as such, it destroys language. Taken from a testimony given at the TRC, a woman speaks out about the loss of a loved one: 'This inside me... fights my tongue. It destroys... words. Before he was blown up, they cut off his hands so he could not be fingerprinted... So how do I say this? - this trouble... I want his hands back'. Marked by ellipses, her speech is helpless in the face of such a physical loss. She cannot put into words what these hands, marked with suffering, could testify. Furthermore, she faces the challenge of being able to fit a truthful and unique account of suffering into the conventions of a story. 'People do not make up stories by themselves', writes Arthur Frank, 'storytellers have learned formal structures of narrative, conventional metaphors and imagery, and standards of what is and is not appropriate to tell.' How can any victim keep a 'formal structure' when pain is, by its very nature, interruptive and uncontrolled? How can 'conventional metaphors' suffice? How can victims of apartheid South Africa keep a 'standard of what is and is not appropriate to tell' when their treatment at the hands of much of the white community kept no moral 'standard' and fell unspeakably below the levels of what could be deemed 'appropriate'? Indeed, 'to locate these experiences in some familiar narrative, to 'mediate' or even normalize the atrocity' is not suitable. The act of fitting an account of suffering into the generic conventions of a story, so as the public can understand them, almost makes the abuse unexceptional. Primo Levi takes this further, writing, 'perhaps what happened (The Holocaust) cannot be understood, because to understand is almost to justify.' In organising public hearings so as victims and perpetrators of abuse could share their stories, the TRC aimed to promote a future based on amnesty, forgiveness, and perhaps even grace. However, moving forward was never going to be easy when the real victims - those who died due to the apartheid regime - are absent; when stories cannot give form to the silence of the absence of bodies. Although for this reason alone it cannot be said that the TRC was a success, it was perhaps the best option for a place so entirely torn in two. Although words can never replace or even testify to the suffering body, moving forward with communication rather than punishment minimalises the possibility of even more deaths. In the case of Disgrace, Lurie publically refusing to repent for his sins may well be understandable considering his personal lack of remorse, but it meant that he could not move on in the same institution and ultimately he was fired. Moreover, his display towards Melanie's family may have hidden inappropriate desires towards Desiree, but it was a welcome apology and provided some level of closure. We cannot be sure that he was forgiven, and the current of desire within him means that he was no reformed soul, but it was at the very least an attempt to move forward from his period of disgrace. Nonetheless, To recall Hannah Arendt: 'men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and... they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable'. South African apartheid was, by all accounts a crime against humanity. Even in the spirit of optimism, believing that most victims and the families of victims truly forgave their oppressors is impossible. Yet, Jacques Derrida argues that the very essence of forgiveness is the unforgivable, and that 'forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalising. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible'. To publically confess is an oxymoron: it is translating the untranslatable into a narrative and subsequently asking for forgiveness from the unforgivable. Whether the TRC could be seen to work or not, it asked for too much and too little. Other than through an act of grace, the perpetrators' amnesty could not amount to their forgiveness; but although grace connotes religion, Coetzee suggests that a secular form of grace may appear in the realisation of the suffering body. In the case of the TRC, grace may come not when publically confessing your own crimes against humanity, but rather through a sudden realisation of another's immense suffering: the unspoken moment of giving oneself over to the suffering body. Whereas Lurie's supplication before Melanie's parents was not an act of grace, one may ask whether, by the novel's close, Lurie has atoned for his disgrace. The novel ends with Lurie handing over a dog to be euthanized, a dog which he may have grown to love. Animals are the embodiment of the secular and of the body, having no souls in the Christian belief (indeed, Lurie comments earlier in the novel, 'The Church Fathers had a long debate about [animals], and decided they don't have proper souls... Their souls are tied to their bodies and die with them [78]). Yet, in a passage with almost sacred gravity, we read that Lurie bears the crippled dog in his arms 'like a lamb' [220], into a room which smells of 'expiration, the soft, short smell of the released soul' [219]. It is surely this scene in which Lurie is most likely to have atoned for his disgrace; this ending which best fits the descri ption of 'the endless story of the self [being] brought to finality... at the point where it is most unaware'. Lurie gives himself over to the dog, and then gives up the dog. It is his most selfless act in the novel.